Monday, February 24, 2014

Film Atlas (Czech Republic): Case for a Rookie Hangman

Country: Czech Republic

Title: Case for a
Rookie Hangman (1969)

The opening credits announce that
Case for a Rookie Hangman is adapted from Part 3 of Gulliver’s Travels (notably
the least popular section) and admits that Jonathan Swift would’ve likely
“turned over in his grave” had he seen the results, which bear only a passing
resemblance.

Lemuel Gulliver is standing before
a roadblock. He takes an unpaved detour and finds himself lost in a tranquil
forest while his car drives on without him. With a misleading sense of
familiarity, he comes upon a solitary decaying house littered with forgotten
emblems of his childhood and catches a glimpse of Marketa, his first love, who
drowned twenty years earlier. Reality gives way under Lemuel’s feet, and, after
being gunned down by mysterious intruders, he plunges into Balnibarbi through a
door in the floor. There a professor holds up a flashcard reading “I’m sorry,
but this is not a dream,” and an eerie silence prevails. Lemuel is arrested by
the rather ludicrous Academy of Inventors for possession of a watch he
purloined from the corpse of a well-dressed rabbit (the first of many Alice in
Wonderland references) and the next day he is used as a case study for a
college class on interrogation. Later he’s called before the childlike governor
and learns that Balnibarbi is beset by the flying kingdom of Laputa, which
blots out the sun for long periods. He meets a succession of rather unhelpful
characters, joins a dubious band of poet rebels, witnesses a water riot at some
sort of refugee camp and has other adventures, but primarily busies himself
with chasing the elusive Marketa. Her real identity is in constant flux and it
doesn’t help that as whenever he makes any romantic progress he wakes up in a
bed, naked, with another woman entirely.

As things come to a head, Lemuel is
led to a circus-sponsored execution contraption but is reprieved by a special
invitation to Laputa. There he receives a cold welcome until the ministers
learn that he once visited Monte Carlo. It soon becomes clear that their king,
absent now for 11 years, works there as a hotel porter at the Carlton. The city
and its hapless staff have drifted aimlessly since his departure. When Lemuel
returns below, he finds that the Balnibarbians are unreceptive to the news that
their god-like Laputian masters are actually unaware of them and indifferent to
their plight. The governor and the rebels resort to violence. Lemuel flees. He
reunites with the village idiot, encountered earlier, and they move on to the
lands beyond the roadblock. Lemuel notes that the rabbit’s watch is now running
backwards. “Be happy,” the idiot tells him, “that it’s still ticking.”

Case for a Rookie Hangman is an
exercise in surrealist dreamlogic that, at first glance, may seem totally
impenetrable. The film has an episodic structure potholed with disorienting
ellipses and impossible geographic transitions that threaten to shake us loose,
but director Pavel Juracek leaves just enough breadcrumbs to keep the viewer on
track. Often, though, the film feels more connected by implications, echoes and
symbols than by conventional narrative so your mileage, and interpretations,
may vary. That said, even at its most confusing it’s still a highly satisfying
film. The tone is kept predominantly light and entertaining by the fanciful
cinematography, sporadic sex appeal and absurdist humor (scientists eliminate
November to reduce flu epidemics, bureaucrats carefully shred a mural so that
each fragment can be precisely cataloged, a nut-cracking statesman plays ‘the
floor is lava’ on newspaper islands) while the accrual of indirect hints and
satirical jabs (targeted at censorship and silence, bureaucracy and
mismanagement, coercion and collaboration)allow a more serious political undertone to peek through, enough so that
Juracek was banned from Czech cinema for life.

At the heart of the film’s
fertile imagination and haunting imagery is Juracek’s talent for scouting out
locations bound up in otherworldly enchantments and dressing baroque sets in
dilapidation rife with lost history, but it wouldn’t have worked without
cinematographer Jan Kalis’s unique combination of seductive nostalgia and noir
menace. Case for a Rookie Hangman is a rare film, even within the context of
the underappreciated Czech New Wave, but it has a unique, timeless brilliance.